But I didn’t want to get better right away, I was happy to vegetate a little. I began listening to music again. Slowly, I regained my strength, relearned gestures. The SS doctor had granted me a month’s leave for my convalescence, and I intended to take full advantage of it, whatever happened. In the beginning of August, Helene came back to see me. I was still weak but I could walk; I received her in pajamas and a bathrobe and made her some tea. It was extraordinarily hot out, not a breath of air circulated through the open windows. Helene was very pale and had a lost look I had never seen on her before. She asked about my health; I saw then that she was crying: “It’s horrible,” she said, “horrible.” I was embarrassed, I didn’t know what to say. Many of her colleagues had been arrested, people with whom she had been working for years. “It’s not possible, they must have made a mistake…I heard that your friend Thomas was in charge of the investigations, couldn’t you talk to him?”—“That wouldn’t do any good,” I said gently. “Thomas is doing his duty. But don’t worry too much about your friends. They might just want to ask them some questions. If they’re innocent, they’ll let them go.” She had stopped crying and was wiping her eyes, but her face was still tense. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But still,” she went on, “we should try to help them, don’t you think?” Despite my fatigue, I remained patient: “Helene, you have to understand what is going on right now. The Führer was nearly assassinated, those men wanted to betray Germany. If you try to intervene, you’ll just attract suspicion. There’s nothing you can do. It’s in the hands of God.”—“Of the Gestapo, you mean,” she replied with an angry movement. She got hold of herself: “I’m sorry, I’m…I’m…” I touched her hand: “It will be all right.” She drank some tea as I contemplated her. “And you?” she asked. “Are you going to go back to your…work?” I looked out the window, the silent ruins, the pale blue sky clouded by the omnipresent smoke. “Not right away. I have to get my strength back.” She held her cup up, with both hands. “What’s going to happen?” I shrugged: “In general? We’ll keep on fighting, people will keep on dying, and then someday it will end, and the ones who are still alive will try to forget all this.” She lowered her head: “I miss the days we went swimming at the pool,” she murmured.—“If you like,” I offered, “when I’m better, we can go back.” She looked out the window in turn: “There aren’t any more pools in Berlin,” she said quietly.

Leaving, she had paused on the threshold and looked at me again. I was going to speak, but she put a finger on my lips: “Don’t say anything.” She left that finger on an instant too long. Then she turned heel and quickly went downstairs. I didn’t understand what she wanted, she seemed to be revolving around something without daring either to approach it or leave it. This ambiguity troubled me, I would have liked her to declare herself openly; then I could have chosen, said yes or no, and it would have been settled. But she herself must not have known what it was. And what I had told her during my fit must not have made things any easier; no bath, no swimming pool would be enough to wash away such words.

I had also begun reading again. But I would have been quite incapable of reading serious books, literature; I went over the same sentence ten times before realizing I hadn’t understood it. That’s how I found on my shelves the Martian adventures of E. R. Burroughs, which I had brought back from the attic of Moreau’s house and carefully put away without ever opening them. I read these three books at one go; but to my regret I found none of the emotion that had gripped me when I read them as a teenager, when, locked in the bathroom or buried in my bed, I forgot the external world for hours to lose myself voluptuously in the meanderings of this barbaric universe with its confused eroticism, peopled with warriors and princesses wearing nothing but weapons and jewelry, a whole weird jumble of monsters and machines. I made some surprising discoveries, though, in them, unsuspected by the dazzled boy I had been: certain passages in these science fiction novels, in fact, revealed this American prose writer as one of the unknown precursors of völkisch thinking. His ideas, in my idleness, led me to others; remembering Brandt’s advice, which I had till then been much too busy to follow, I sent for a typewriter and wrote a brief memo for the Reichsführer, quoting Burroughs as a model for the profound social reforms that the SS should envisage after the war. Thus, to increase the birthrate after the war and force men to marry young, I took as an example the red Martians, who recruited their forced labor not just from criminals and prisoners of war, but also from confirmed bachelors who were too poor to pay the high celibacy tax which all red-Martian governments impose; and I devoted an entire chapter to this celibacy tax that, if it were ever imposed, would put a heavy strain on my own finances. But I reserved even more radical suggestions for the SS elite, which should follow the example of the green Martians, those three-meter-tall monsters with four arms and fangs: All property among the green Martians is owned in common by the community, except the personal weapons, ornaments, and sleeping silks and furs of the individuals…. The women and children of a man’s retinue may be likened to a military unit for which he is responsible in various ways, as in matters of instruction, discipline, sustenance, etc…. His women are in no sense wives…. Their mating is a matter of community interest solely, and is directed without reference to natural selection. The council of chieftains of each community control the matter as surely as the owner of a Kentucky racing stud directs the scientific breeding of his stock for the improvement of the whole. I drew inspiration from this to suggest progressive reforms of the Lebensborn. I was actually digging my own grave, and part of me almost laughed as I wrote it, but it also seemed to me to stem logically from our Weltanschauung; what’s more I knew that it would please the Reichsführer; the passages from Burroughs reminded me obscurely of the prophetic utopia he had revealed to us in Kiev, in 1941. In fact, ten days after I sent my memorandum, I received a reply signed by his hand (his instructions, most of the time, were signed by Brandt or even Grothmann):

Very Dear Doktor Aue!

I read your memorandum with keen interest. I’m happy to know that you are recovering and that you are devoting your convalescence to useful research; I didn’t know you were interested in these questions, so vital for the future of our race. I wonder if Germany, even after the war, will be ready to accept such profound and necessary ideas. A lot of work still has to be done on ways of thinking. Whatever the case, when you’re all better, I’ll be happy to discuss these projects and this visionary author with you in more detail.

Heil Hitler!

Yours,

Heinrich Himmler

Flattered, I waited for Thomas to visit me to show him this letter, as well as my memorandum; but to my surprise, he reacted angrily to it: “You really think this is the right time for such childishness?” He seemed to have lost all his sense of humor; when he started to describe the latest arrests to me, I began to understand why. Even in my own circle some men were implicated: two of my university friends and my former professor in Kiel, Jessen, who had apparently grown closer to Goerdeler in recent years. “We also found evidence against Nebe, but he’s disappeared. Vanished into thin air. Well, if anyone knows how to do that, it’s he. He must have been a little twisted: at his place, there was a movie of a gassing in the East, can you imagine him putting that on at night?” I had rarely seen Thomas so nervous. I made him drink, offered him cigarettes, but he didn’t let much drop; I was just able to divine that Schellenberg had had contact with certain opposition circles, before the attempt. At the same time, Thomas ranted angrily against the conspirators: “Killing the Führer! How could they think that would be a solution? That he be removed from command of the Wehrmacht, all right, he’s ill anyway. One could even have imagined, I don’t know, forcing him into retirement, if it was really necessary, letting him remain President but handing over power to the Reichsführer…According to Schellenberg, the British would agree to negotiate with the Reichsführer. But killing the Führer? It’s insane, they didn’t realize…They swore an oath to him, then they try to kill him!” It seemed really to bother him; as for me, the very idea that Schellenberg or the Reichsführer had thought of putting the Führer aside shocked me. I didn’t see much difference between that or killing him, but I didn’t say so to Thomas; he was already too depressed.